[coder543]

> Siri/iOS-Dictation is truly good when it comes to understanding the speech.

What...? It is terrible, even compared to Whisper Tiny, which was released years ago under an Apache 2.0 license so Apple could have adopted it instantly and integrated it into their devices. The bigger Whisper models are far better, and Parakeet TDT V2 (English) / V3 (Multilingual) are quite impressive and very fast.

I have no idea what would make someone say that iOS dictation is good at understanding speech... it is so bad.

For a company that talks so much about accessibility, it is baffling to me that Apple continues to ship such poor quality speech to text with their devices.

[derefr]

Maybe they have exactly the accent iOS dictation was trained to recognize.

[solarkraft]

Its quality isn’t great, but it is damn fast and that matters a lot! Whisper doesn’t even work live without hacks.

[coder543]

Parakeet is insanely fast and much more accurate, and it doesn't really matter that Whisper requires hacks to work live when those hacks have existed for years and work great. (The Hello Transcribe app on iOS is a great example of how well Whisper can work with live streaming on an iPhone. The smaller models are extremely fast, even with the "hacks".)

Parakeet TDT's architecture is actually a really cool way to boost both the speed and efficiency of real time STT compared to traditional approaches.

[fragmede]

Terrible? It's fine. What's your accent that it's terrible? It even pulls last names from my address book and spells them right.

[coder543]

Terrible relative to everything else that exists today. I have a neutral American accent.

Maybe you just don’t know what you’re missing? Google’s default speech to text is still bad compared to Whisper and Parakeet, but even Google’s is markedly better than Apple’s.

I cannot think of a single speech to text system that I’ve run into in the past 5 years that is less accurate than the one Apple ships.

Sure, Apple’s speech to text is incredible compared to what was on the flip phone I had 20 years ago. Terrible is relative. Much better options exist today, and they’re under very permissive licenses. Apple’s refusal to offer a better, more accessible experience to their users is frustrating when they wouldn’t even have to pay a licensing fee to ship something better. Whisper was released under a permissive license nearly 4 years ago.

Apple also restricts third party keyboards to an absurdly tiny amount of memory, so it isn’t even possible to ship a third party keyboard that provides more accurate on-device speech to text without janky workarounds (requiring the user to open the keyboard's own app first each time).

[CamJN]

As someone who tried every TTS in existance a few years ago for some product work, Apple’s is so consistantly better that we wound up getting a bunch of apple stuff just for the TTS.

[coder543]

“A few years ago” sounds like it could be before the modern era of STT, as defined by when Whisper was released.

Your comment says TTS, which is different from what I’m discussing, though, so there might be some confusion.

[catlifeonmars]

> I have a neutral American accent

This is tangential but is _any_ accent objectively neutral?

[coder543]

Neutral here means not strongly identifiable as any particular regional American accent. Some people have very strong regional accents, some don’t. It is still clearly an American accent, not British or anything else.

[catlifeonmars]

TIL (assuming you mean American as in the United States of America) that this is known as a General American accent.